Michelle Dean | The Nation

Lance Gross and Jurnee Smollett-Bell in Temptation. (Lionsgate/KC Bailey)

The plot of Tyler Perry’s latest film, Temptation, goes something like this: woman becomes unhappy in her marriage, decides to have an affair with a bad guy (after he borderline rapes her on a plane because Women Are Like That), bad guy is a drug addict, violent and HIV-positive to boot, woman ends up alone, diseased and unhappy, while her ex-husband finds happiness with a more virtuous woman. I mean, insert some weird chase scenes in a crappy pickup truck and some admittedly great costuming. But add on the downside bad acting (from no less than Kim Kardashian) and really terrible editing and I’ve mostly saved you the $14, if you were inclined to check it out. Probably you were already dissuaded by the terrible reviews in those places that even bothered to cover the film. Everyone seemed pretty convinced that the implication of the conclusion—that infidelity “deserves” punishment, and the punishment of HIV specifically—was complete hogwash.

Roger Ebert receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, June 23, 2005. (Reuters/Mario Anzuoni)

Yesterday, after the news about Roger Ebert broke, Chicago radio host Milos Stehlik reached out to Werner Herzog. Herzog and Ebert had been friends for decades, Ebert having been a great admirer of Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. From there it was nearly always a love-in, Ebert often writing tributes to the director. But it did not obviate Ebert’s critical eye. In one conversation at the University of Urbana-Champaign in 2004, Ebert told Herzog, “Your films expand me, they exhilarate me, they make me feel that you are trying to put your arms around enormous ideas.” He then added, “And at the same time there's a feeling of hopelessness. I think of Aguirre on the sinking raft, in the middle of the river, mad, surrounded by gibbering monkeys.”

A scene from Top of the Lake. (Credit: Sundance Channel)

Top of the Lake, which premiered last night on the Sundance channel, is a police procedural, a genre I often avoid, at least in its popular-network incarnation. (The Wire, for example, I obviously loved.) There is something that has always bothered me about the way these shows organize their plots around a particularly lurid read of violence in modern life and, in many cases, violence against women. This is not a matter of blood and guts so much as it is that the entire enterprise—the pretense that the cops are always well-intentioned and impeccably trained, indifferent to power structures and, to the last one, a maverick. Nobody on television suffers from less-than-diligent law enforcement. The victims are, often enough, flat, idealized girls who hardly seem human. They aren’t usually alive for long enough to acquire a personality. Sympathy for the perpetrator—or the cop dedicated to catching him—is the only room for real empathy in the narrative.

James Franco in a scene from Oz the Great and Powerful. (AP Photo/Disney Enterprises)

Glenn Kenny, a film critic friend of mine, notes at MSN Movies that the problem with this new Oz the Great and Powerful is that James Franco is grievously miscast as the Wizard of Oz. To me this was more or less clear from the trailer, Franco’s bumble-stoner presence an instant false note when placed in the same frame as the self-possession of Mila Kunis, Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz. (I haven’t seen the movie yet.) But the disparity of talent there only mirrors the way the Oz story has been structured, from the moment L. Frank Baum set pen to paper. As underscored by spin-off work like Wicked, the fact is, Oz has always been matriarchal. Which is not, in this case at least, a feminist utopia in the sense of being a place where women nurture each other right into Scandinavian social-democratic bliss. Instead, in Oz, as Alison Lurie once put it in The New York Review of Books, “Women rule all the good societies and some of the bad ones.” For every Glinda, you get a Wicked Witch.